Days of Feasting and Rejoicing (eBOOK)
In this brilliant existential portrayal of identity, David Bergen introduces Esther Maile, an expat American living in Thailand in a house rented by the richer, more popular Christine. While on holiday in Bali, Christine is caught by an ocean wave and drowns. Esther rushes to save her, but in the chaos that ensues, the police arrive and confuse Esther for Christine.
For someone who would prefer to be anyone but herself, this is the perfect solution — no matter the consequences. When a local Thai police captain, Net Wantok, begins to investigate Christine’s death and seeks out Esther, he is caught between his curiosity — she is charming, evasive, and flirtatious — and the awareness that people around Esther are disappearing. Sensing danger, Esther acts out of fear and pulls the one person who loves her into her perilous world.
Bergen’s mesmerizing psychological drama hums with expatriate gossip, sexual tension, unexpected violence, a passion for food, and a woman who, seemingly unhindered by questions of truth or morality, hints at the darkness in all of us.
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“David Bergen’s new novel is a tightly wound thriller with a monstrous protagonist who induces equal amounts of horror and admiration. It’s a hell of a tightrope-walk that brings to mind the best of Patricia Highsmith.” — Michael Redhill, author of The Trial of Katterfelto
“Taut, engrossing, and tense, Days of Feasting and Rejoicing is a fine-tuned, psychologically nuanced suspense story that offers so much more than most literary crime thrillers. Expertly crafted and impossible to put down.” — Iain Reid, author of We Spread
“Days of Feasting and Rejoicing smartly renews the story of dark reinvention we associate with Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels and Antonioni’s The Passenger. With his typical elegance, David Bergen compellingly moves us through disquiet, moral tension, high drama, and the fully human dilemmas of chief inspector Net Wantok, and into the killing mind of Esther Maile. The novel beautifully plays the desire for release against the impossibility of true escape.” — Michael Helm, author of After James
“Days of Feasting and Rejoicing is at once a compelling character study, a chilling thriller, and a cautionary tale to beware the never-ending quest to fill the void within.” — The British Columbia Review
“Days of Feasting and Rejoicing echoes Alfred Hitchcock’s great work in film, in works such as Rope. It’s difficult to achieve the slow burn of Hitchcockian suspense with the written word; Bergen skilfully pulls it off with a flourish.” — Winnipeg Free Press
Praised by the Montreal Gazette as “one of Canada’s best writers” and by The Globe and Mail as “brilliant and utterly convincing,” David Bergen is the bestselling author of twelve novels and two collections of short fiction. In book after book he is a writer “operating at the highest level of his craft.”
Among his most acclaimed works are The Time in Between, a national bestseller; The Age of Hope, a finalist for Canada Reads; and Out of Mind, a follow up to The Matter with Morris. He has won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year five times, and his writing has also been shortlisted for Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize. In 2018 Bergen was presented with the Writer’s Trust Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life. He lives in Winnipeg.
